By KENNETH KWAMA

Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, two of the three founders of YouTube were in their 20s when they founded the biggest video-Internet company in 2005. Less than two years later, they sold it for $1.65 billion.

They soon found themselves in celebrity circles in Hollywood and amongst top business people in the US. "But because they are still young enough to get the occasional pimple, I don’t mind calling them Chad and Steve. They are pre-moguls, near magnates," wrote a journalist with Time magazine two years ago.

At a party in West Hollywood, California, in 2006, former US Vice-President Al Gore tapped Steve on the shoulder outside a bathroom to congratulate him on the success of YouTube. Chad chatted with Leonardo DiCaprio. The two were later accused of staying too long at the party.

YouTube became a phenomenon in 2006 for many reasons, but was mostly celebrated because it was both easy and edgy, which is a rare combination. One could watch videos on the site without downloading any software or even registering.

"That, in turn, means advertisers want to be on YouTube, which is why Google paid $1.65 billion for it. If, say, 10 per cent of the $54 billion spent on television advertising in the US annually migrates to video sites like YouTube in the next few years, we will pity Chad and Steve for selling for a mere $1.65 billion," wrote a journalist in an online magazine.

Chad (left), Steve and Karim

Although YouTube is a global hit, nothing in the boys’ backgrounds suggested they were headed in the bigger direction. Chad was unusual in his artistic proclivities that coincided with an interest in business and technology.

In ninth grade, he built an amplifier that won third place in a national electronics competition. By the time he was in college, he would hole up for hours online, doing those things boys do this days-studying web design, playing games and experimenting with animation.

PAYPAL GAMBLE

After graduating from Indiana University, he read an article about a new company called PayPal. He later contacted the firm that flew him to California and asked him to show his skills by designing a company logo (it’s still the PayPal logo to this day). That Sunday, PayPal’s CEO offered Chad a job as the company’s first designer. He slept at a friend’s floor for a few weeks, scrounging money for pizza before he got his first paycheque.

In 2002 eBay bought PayPal for $1.54 billion, and as an early employee, Chad walked away with enough to buy a few luxuries, including his Tag Heuer watch and plenty of seed money for a future venture.

"Either, he was incredibly brilliant and he saw the opportunity, or he was really lucky-I don’t know," said Ryan Donahue, who was PayPal’s second designer and roomed with Chad for a time. "But to hit gold with your first job out of college is pretty rare. And then for his first company to be YouTube, he got to be a smart guy." Chad’s greatest stroke of luck at PayPal was meeting Steve and Jawed Karim, two PayPal engineers with whom he would occasionally bat around ideas for start-ups. Karim enrolled at Stanford in 2005 to pursue a master’s in computer science, and today there’s some tension between him and the other founders, who have become famous while he toils in a small, modestly furnished dorm room.

But Steve has always been something of a risk taker. He left the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign a semester and a half early to work for PayPal.

Steve was born in Taipei and has his own interesting relationship with luck. When he was a little kid, maybe six, his mother took him to see a fortune-teller who told him he would never be rich.

"And that’s kind of stayed with me ever since," he told Time magazine. The experience left him with a sense of dread that he took half-seriously. But things always seem to work out for Steve, who carries an aura of mischief with him like a cloud of cigarette smoke. He drinks cappuccino well into the night and doesn’t get to work until noon approaches.

Although Karim is named on YouTube’s site as a co-founder, Chad and Steve have promoted a highly simplified history of the company’s founders that largely excludes him. In the stripped-down version-repeated in dozens of news accounts-Chad and Steve got the idea in the winter of 2005, after they had trouble sharing videos online that had been shot at a dinner party at Steve’s San Francisco apartment.

Karim says the dinner party never happened and that the seed idea of video sharing was his-although he is quick to say its realisation in YouTube required "the equal efforts of all three of us."

A SIMPLE LOGO

Chad and Steve agree that Karim deserves credit for the early idea. YouTube’s success owes partly to its retro name, simple logo and alternative feel, all of which Chad contributed, while Steve was making sure the videos played quickly and easily.

The biggest threat to YouTube remains potential copyright lawsuits from content providers who could claim that the site-like Napster before it, is enabling thieves. In a recent report, Google acknowledged that "adverse results in these lawsuits may include awards of substantial monetary damages." Mark Cuban, the billionaire co-founder of Broadcast.com, has publicly stated that the potential for legal trouble makes YouTube a bad investment.

But Levchin, their former boss at PayPal, says, "The essential crisis is coming. And the essential crisis for an entrepreneur is what the business is all about."